The other day I met my friend for a walk through a cemetery and on the way, we bumped into some other friends who were going to have a picnic and eat mussels and fries, so we joined them. After lunch, we went to a tiny art exhibition in a shed in someone's backyard. To enter the exhibition, we walked down a small alley and through a door into the garden. A guy wearing a frayed baseball cap let us into the shed where there were around six small artworks hanging on the walls. It seemed like the vibe the artists were going for was a kind of refined amateurism, creating objects that at first glance looked like rubbish but on closer inspection seemed meticulously constructed. One of the artworks, for example, was a plastic container that had a little green toy car stuck onto it. The overall aesthetic reminded me of when people fashionably wear hiking boots. The artworks held my attention for around 5 minutes. One friend stayed in the shed for a long time. When they came outside, I asked them if they really liked the art. They said no, they hadn't really liked the art. They just got distracted talking about Kabbalah with the guy with the frayed hat, who for some reason was interested in the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
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We made our way to a bottle shop nearby and then sat on a median strip and drank wine. Someone mentioned podcasts. I said I don't listen to many, but I've been listening to one called Our Struggle, which is nominally about two writer friends, a man and a woman I think around my age, discussing Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle books. They invite other literary people on to the podcast to talk about Knausgaard, but generally they end up talking about their own lives—things they've been eating, embarrassments, neurosis, the detritus of daily life—the things that Knausgaard himself so thoroughly and earnestly details in his autobiographical novels. The production quality of the podcast is very low, which I appreciate because I don't feel like it's making any demands on my full attention. It often begins mid conversation or sometimes even mid-sentence. The episodes are really long and seem to be hardly edited at all. The sound quality in the interviews often sucks. Sometimes one of the hosts will just leave for a while to get food or put on a different outfit. The radical amateurism is disarming for the guests. Some are confused. Some get agitated and berate the hosts. Others relax into the vibe.
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I generally listen to Our Struggle during long runs up along a creek-side path nearby my house. That morning the guest was a writer famous on the internet for meticulously documenting his sexual exploits with young women on his blog. Nobody knows his true identity. He goes by the nom de plume Delicious Tacos. He is in his 40s, lives in LA, and works an office a job he doesn't like so that he can freely write about having sex with young women. He said it is crucial for a writer to imagine themselves as an amateur not a professional because once there is an expectation to make money, they will write what people want them to write instead of what they really want to write. (Delicious Tacos most recent novel is about him and a hot co-worker surviving a nuclear apocalypse together.) When he's not writing or pursuing sex with young women Delicious Tacos trains in martial arts, which, along with calorie control, has given him an extraordinarily ripped physique. One podcast host said that she had looked him up online in an image search and saw a topless picture of him and referred to his body as being like that of concentration camp prisoner. Delicious Tacos said he didn't "give a fuck" what she thought of his body because he has regular sex with young, attractive women. He also said that on a recent visit to the doctor he had been told that he has a growth in his prostate that might be cancerous. He said that he had already come to terms with the idea that he would die alone and miserable.
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"For someone who doesn't listen to many podcasts you know a lot about podcasts," one of the people I was drinking with on the median strip said. "Just this one," I said, and then stopped talking, making a mental note to stay quiet for at least 10-15 minutes and to maybe speak less volubly about podcasts in the future or potentially not at all. After I stopped talking about the podcast, someone else told a story about a regular customer at the cafe where she used to work. When he came in alone, he would bring a bib with him and ask, in a baby-ish voice, if one of the waiters might help him put it on before he ate. Stranger still, when he came to the cafe with his family, he didn't bring the bib. "It's not so much the bib fetish that's the issue," she said. "It’s that he pretended to be a normal family man with them, like we were in on this little secret." After that someone else told a story about a friend of a friend who allegedly helped a man dispose of his murdered girlfriend's body to annul his gambling debts. This guy, who was apparently from a wealthy family, had recently played a DJ set at a party thrown by a radio station known for its social justice-oriented message. The question was whether it was appropriate for an alleged accessory to murder to play a DJ set at such a venue. “Only if the music was good,” someone said.
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After some time drinking on the median strip, I had to go the toilet, so I wandered into a convenience store on the street corner nearby. I asked the shop-owner if I could use his toilet and he said sure and directed me with his hand to the back of the store. I took a wrong turn and ended up in what looked like maybe his bedroom. There was a small stretcher mattress, a stove-top, a wooden table. The walls were bare except for hand-drawn pencil pictures of dogs sitting or reclining on couches. The torsos of the animals were extremely well-rendered and life-like, but the faces were uncannily human. After apologizing to the shop-owner for accidentally invading his privacy I asked if the drawings were his. They were. He told me they were portmanteaus of owners and dogs that he saw walk past his shop—dog bodies and owner faces. I told him they were really good and asked if he sold them. "I'm an amateur," he said. "No one is supposed to see them.”